WASHINGTON— With President Obama kicking off two days of meetings with China's President Xi Jinping in Rancho Mirage, Calif., on Friday, the summit inevitably beckons memories of earlier efforts by White House occupants trying to find common ground with geopolitical rivals through intimate diplomacy.

Ronald Reagan formed a bond with the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev when they met for the first time in 1985.

Richard Nixon made a remarkable impression on Mao Zedong when he traveled to Beijing for high-level talks in 1972. And in 2001, George W. Bush questionably declared after meeting the Russian President Vladimir Putin for two hours in Slovenia that he was able "to get a sense of his soul."

The White House similarly sees the president's weekend with Xi at the Sunnlyands estate as a critical opportunity to change the dynamics of what has been a difficult relationship between the two countries and has made clear they see Xi as a different kind of Chinese leader.

"He seems to be someone who is fast on his feet, who is open to engagement, who is willing to speak directly to Americans and to issues of concern to Americans in a manner that was not the hallmark of some of his predecessors," said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified to discuss the White House's thinking on Xi.

The two leaders are scheduled to spend hours talking and will trade notes — and complaints — about each other's economic policy, North Korea strategy and cyberhacking. They'll have a private dinner on Friday night, and will hold more talks on Saturday morning — including some one-on-one time — before going separate ways Saturday afternoon.

The meeting marks the first between the two since Xi became president in March.

Substance notwithstanding, the summit has been largely billed as a getting-to-know-you opportunity between Obama and the man who will lead the world's foremost rising power for the next decade.

While there is no guarantee that Xi and Obama will strike any personal chemistry that will significantly change the trajectory of U.S.-China dialogue, which has been largely stilted and formal for the last 40 years, trying to connect on a deeper level with Xi is the president's central aim.

"This is really about building a personal relationship between the two," said Jeffrey Bader, who served as East Asia director in the White House National Security Council during Obama's first term.

Such efforts have paid dividends in not-so-distant past.

Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time on neutral turf in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1985. In the days leading up the summit, Reagan later recalled for his autobiography being nervous and was having trouble sleeping.

But when he sat down with Gorbachev, the two quickly connected. There first session at the Geneva summit, in a small boathouse a short walk from the chateau from where the formal sessions were held, was supposed to be just a 15 minute chat. But the two men — with just their interpreters by their sides —would talk for an hour.

"There was a warmth in his face and style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I'd seen in most senior Soviet officials I'd met until then," Reagan later wrote in An American Life.

That first meeting marked the beginning of a strong relationship between the two men just as the Soviets were to begin their decline in Eastern Europe.

Nixon, who had been strongly anti-communist, came to believe that engaging China and the Soviet Union was in American interest and started laying the groundwork for his historic 1972 trip early in his presidency.

Behind closed doors, he had frank conversations with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai about China's territorial claims to Taiwan, the Vietnam war and Beijing's withering relationship with the Soviet Union.

Nixon even managed to get a little tipsy from toasting shots of grain alcohol with Zhou at a banquet held in his honor. The week-long visit was largely credited for opening a closed China to the world and was widely regarded as Nixon's greatest foreign policy achievement.

But personal warmth doesn't always translate into finding common ground on policy matters.

After the first meeting between Bush and Putin in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2001, both sides declared it a success. Bush even went to memorably say of Putin: "I was able to get a sense of his soul. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy."

The rhetorical embrace of Putin, who had been chilly to American concerns, was immediately questioned by Bush's critics at home. And Putin spent much of the next seven years thwarting the Bush administration's efforts to expand NATO and build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

Matthew Goodman, who served as a senior adviser on Asia economic policy in the first Obama administration, said that the White House should be optimistic going into the summit about Xi but realize that much is unknown.

"The only problem with this is we tend as Americans to make judgments early on about new leaders that can sometimes be superficial," said Goodman, who is now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "What we don't know is how much running room he has to really to express his own point-of-view and to follow through on anything he may agree to do. The constraints behind him are not as clear even if his style is confirmed to be very different."